It was cancer – an aggressive form. I saw him only once after that. Got a flight immediately after the end of term and stayed a couple of nights with them – she wouldn’t let me stop elsewhere. Already Tyler was like an old man, curled up in foetal position under the bedclothes, one skeletal arm sticking out like an obscenity, and though he tried to smile, it was clear it was hard. So for two days I did my turn along with the family and a few others, holding that papery hand, talking quietly or listening to music with him. I took a disc of the Mendelssohn songs with me – it turned out he already had the Barenboim recording, but on this one the ‘Duetto’ was played at a kinder, slower pace – and occasionally I got the faintest squeeze back; even once, which was almost too much for me, a request to touch the apricot hair. He died not long afterwards – it was the anniversary only three weeks ago – and they played one of the songs at his funeral. I think of him often. Their son is very like.
Loxton died too, a little early perhaps, but at least it was more in the way of things. We led the Reading Party together for eight years and then he passed the baton to me, along with the safekeeping of Godfrey’s journal. When he retired a few months later, Priyam helped me arrange a gathering in his honour of almost all the people who’d been to Cornwall over the years – Tyler was one of the few who didn’t make it – and we all dug out photos and reminisced together. You could tell Dennis was touched. After that we saw each other from time to time. He enjoyed his role as Emeritus Fellow, kept going with the Wine Committee and came in regularly to High Table or to read the papers at midday. We used to have Sunday lunch together – it was usually me to him rather than him to me; probably the quality of the cooking – and after we’d eaten we would do a tour of his garden and he’d tell me what was thriving and what was not. He died right there, suddenly, of a heart attack, when he was planting bulbs near the potting shed, and was found on the ground still holding his dibber. He would have liked that.
As for me, there’ve been other relationships, but never again with a student. I didn’t marry, though I was with one man – nothing to do with the University – for nearly a decade, and I didn’t have children; became a cliché of my own, in a way. At least, that’s what Jenny once said, but then there was a lot I hadn’t shared with her, so I probably deserved it. Mostly, she’s been wonderful; she certainly stuck to a kinder interpretation with my god-daughter, focused on my books, which have always sold rather well, and my appearances on telly, which in the early days suggested a kind of glamour, rather than on that picture of a childless spinster. It’s been a busy life: juggling so many activities, keeping in touch with so many young people, hearing tales of still more – they’re almost family.
I stayed on for nearly twenty-five years, becoming the senior of several female Fellows; did my own stints as Dean and then Tutor for Admissions, graduating to better rooms – and a better bed! – on a staircase with other dons; and later, once they made me a Reader, using my ‘living out’ allowance to subsidise a ground-floor flat near that extraordinary bookshop until UEA enticed me away with the professorship.
The campus here is a marvellous place – still faintly radical, and I love the modernist buildings and the swathes of green – plus of course East Anglia has always been home to my parents, who are seriously old.
All the same, it was a difficult decision giving up the College and its batty traditions, abandoning my little garden – populated in the early days with cuttings from Loxton, and moving away from so many friends. But Oxford is a bubble, not quite the real world, and the barriers in the Faculty and the University can get to you in the end, though I’m told it’s better than it was. Various people stressed the advantages of a change, not least my brothers, although Jenny said they had a vested interest, along with their wives.
Maybe recognition was just too beguiling after all that battling to shape things my way: Andy had been right about that – it was exhausting, demeaning even, trying to charm without losing credibility. Besides, the people who really matter come to visit me in Norwich. There is one man, a few years younger, as it happens, with whom I enjoy spending time. We choose not to share a house, but we sail a lot, do stuff together. He’s perceptive and kind, and lets me get on with my work, even on the boat; and perhaps I stop him being too much of a loner – I get invited to endless events, so we’re always going out, seeing people. Anyhow, we understand each other. I’m very content.
One of the good things I did when I’d settled in properly was to see about introducing a Reading Party. I’m an old hand now with 18–22 year-olds; they’re endlessly stimulating. We’ve sorted the funding at last – Rupert has again been exceptionally generous, given that it’s not his alma mater – and the School of History is selecting a dozen students from those who have expressed an interest and a good few who haven’t presumed to do so.
Of course it will be different outside the collegiate system. Some of my old colleagues – even some of my old students – say not to mind if it doesn’t work. I have more faith. Besides, it’s important to try: young people need that sort of experience, especially when so much teaching has moved online. We’ve found a place in the Peak District, in the middle of nowhere and a bit wild. Loxton would have approved. It’s nice to think it might be a success – and it would be another way of making history, another minor first. We’ll see.
Glossary of Oxford terminology
bachelor set: A suite of rooms used as lodgings for a Fellow of a college who, being unmarried, found it convenient to ‘live in’. (Until 1882, Fellows had to be celibate.)
battels: Termly charges made to a member of a college (student or Fellow) for board and lodgings.
a Blue: The highest sporting achievement, awarded after competing in the annual Varsity Match (often against the University of Cambridge).
Bodleian (the Bodleian Library): Oxford’s largest library, founded by Sir Thomas Bodley. Its core buildings date from the very early seventeenth century.
Collections: College exams taken by some students at the start of term to assess academic progress.
college ‘bible’: Some colleges produced annually, for internal use, a printed list of senior and junior members with information on their subjects and so on.
Commem Ball (Commemoration Ball): A college ball held after the end of Trinity term, traditionally ‘black tie’.
Dean: A senior member of the college, usually a young Fellow, responsible for supervising the conduct and discipline of junior members, i.e. students. The Dean sometimes had pastoral responsibilities.
don: A professor, lecturer or Fellow.
Double First: The highest class of undergraduate degree involving two examinations (as in Greats).
Duke Humfrey (Duke Humfrey’s Library): The oldest reading room, built in the late fifteenth century. In the 1970s it housed the oldest and rarest books.
Emeritus (Emeritus Fellow): The title given at some colleges to a retired Fellow.
Examination Schools: An imposing building used as the venue for many University examinations (and for some University lectures).
Exhibitioner: A student holding a college ‘Exhibition’, or financial award; often a sign of academic distinction identified by college tutors, usually awarded for one year and lesser than a Scholarship.
Fellow: A senior member of a college. Collectively, with the head of the college, the Fellows comprise its governing body.
Greats: The four-year undergraduate course in Classics, correctly Literae Humaniores. The first five terms constitute Honour Moderations (‘Mods’), followed by seven terms of Greats.
Hall: The dining hall for students and academic staff in a college (often large and high-ceilinged); also, the activity of dining at the college. Traditionally academic gowns were worn.
High Table: The long table in a college dining hall at which sit the Warden, Fellows and their guests. It is usually on a raised dais at one end of the room, looking down on the students.
Hilary: The second term of the ac
ademic year, eight weeks long, from January to mid-March.
Isis: A termly student magazine, first published in 1892, named after the part of the river Thames that runs through Oxford.
matriculation: Confers membership of the University on students enrolled for a degree-level course.
Michaelmas: The first term of the academic year, eight weeks long, from October to December.
Newdigate Prize: A prize for a poem of less than 300 lines. The prize was founded in 1806.
Norrington Table: A league table of colleges, published annually since the 1960s, showing comparative performance of undergraduates in Finals.
Oxbridge: Collectively, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
PPE: The undergraduate course of Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
PPP: The undergraduate course of Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology.
Prelims (Preliminary Examinations): Exams set by the University. Undergraduates take them in their first year.
Radcliffe Camera: A circular library, funded by John Radcliffe and built in the mid-eighteenth century. Used particularly by the History faculty.
Rhodes Scholar: A recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship, funded by Cecil John Rhodes, which is an international postgraduate award for study at the University of Oxford. Very prestigious.
Scholar: A student holding a college Scholarship, or financial award; often a sign of academic distinction revealed in examination results, usually awarded for one year and grander than an Exhibition.
Schools Dinner: A formal dinner held by senior members of a college for junior members taking a given subject after their Finals (when undergraduates ‘take Schools’).
scout: A housekeeper employed by the college, originally responsible for making beds and cleaning student and other rooms on his or her allotted staircases.
set: A suite of rooms – variously including a study/living room/library, bedroom, bathroom and tiny kitchen – used as lodgings for a Fellow of a college who chooses to ‘live in’.
subfusc: The dark clothes (black, with a white shirt or blouse) worn by men and women with their academic dress (a black gown, a black cap or mortar board, and white bow tie, black tie/ribbon) on occasions such as examinations.
Trinity: The third (summer) term of the academic year, eight weeks long.
tutor: Someone who teaches undergraduates one-to-one or in pairs, usually a Fellow of a college. S/he acts as teacher and academic guide.
tutorial: An hour-long meeting with a tutor, usually involving much background reading and writing an essay. Most undergraduates have at least one tutorial a week.
Tutorial Board: A committee of the head of a college and all its Tutorial Fellows, responsible to its governing body for all its teaching functions.
the Union (the Oxford Union): A debating society founded in the early nineteenth century; particularly popular with budding politicians.
the vac (vacation): The holiday between university terms (the long vac being the one in the summer).
viva (as in ‘viva voce examination’): An oral examination.
Warden: The head of the college (at some colleges; other terms are also used).
(With thanks to the glossary at www.ox.ac.uk and to Wikipedia.)
Historical note
Until the mid 1970s, female undergraduates at the University of Oxford had to attend one of its five women’s colleges, opened between 1878 and 1893. Male undergraduates could choose between twenty-five men’s colleges, the oldest of which had been founded in the thirteenth century.
Women were first admitted to the men’s colleges as undergraduates in 1974, when five of them accepted a total of one hundred women. By 1985 all the men’s colleges had gone mixed; by 2008 all the women’s colleges had done likewise. Female academics first became tutorial fellows in male colleges in 1973, with the first woman heading a former men’s college in 1993 and the first female Vice Chancellor of the university appointed in 2016.
In the 1970s there were Reading Parties at four of Oxford’s male colleges. One had been taking students to a chalet in the French Alps since 1891; the others also went there or (in the case of the first of them to go mixed) to an Edwardian house on the Cornish coast.
With the exception of Dr Ivy Williams, all the characters in The Reading Party are invented.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to many people for help and support with THE READING PARTY, my first novel.
I am particularly grateful to Dr Ray Ockenden – who led the reading party at Wadham College, Oxford, for many years – for his early encouragement.
Various past and present members of the college kindly shared relevant memories with me, including Professors Quassim Cassam, Julie Curtis, Christina Howells, Sally Mapstone and Stephen Monsell; the late Dr Cliff Davies; Alexy & John Holden and Bekah Sparrow. Jason Leech’s dissertation on the decision in favour of co-residence was a godsend. (There is also a wider study, ‘“Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Co-education’ by Nancy Weiss Malkiel, published by Princeton University Press.)
I am enormously grateful to Lane Ashfeldt and Jenny Parrott, who gave me confidence when I first began writing and without whom I would never have got underway. Other early readers were generous with their time and hugely helpful: thank you Frances Ashcroft, Zanna Beswick, Janet Fillingham, Matthew Fox, Ruth Logan, Yvonne Milne and Frances Voelker. I’d also like to acknowledge the many friends who took a special interest, helped with research queries or kept me sane – notably Sally Bruce Lockhart, Margie Campbell, Ivy Chau, Ann Marie Cooper, Sophie Day, Juliet Davis, Sarah Derbyshire, Julie Hage, Crispin Kelly, David Mitchell, Hugh Nineham, Hanni Randell-Bateman, Vicky Smith, Ayesha Tarannum and David Waller. The Gentleman and Freegard families were discreetly supportive: warm thanks all round.
The team at Muswell Press have been wonderful. A massive thank you to Sarah Beal and Kate Beal for their faith in THE READING PARTY, their editorial steers, marketing nous and friendship along the way. Thanks too to Kate Quarry, Jamie Keenan and Anna Pallai for meticulous copy-editing, evocative cover design and savvy publicity respectively.
Above all, I am grateful to the two people who put up with so much day-to-day: my husband Jonathan Freegard (second reader), who is astonishingly attentive, cheerful and kind; and our daughter Lucy Freegard (first reader), who laughs, comforts and teases a lot. They have always been generous about my need to retreat into my own mental space. My love and heartfelt thanks to you both.
Copyright
First published by Muswell Press in 2018
Copyright © Fenella Gentleman 2018
Fenella Gentleman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Typeset by M Rules
This work is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 9781999811730
Muswell Press
London
N6 5HQ
www.muswell-press.co.uk
All rights reserved etc etc (as on previous blurb)
The Reading Party Page 33
